Software delivered via the cloud took center stage at the
15th Annual HR Technology® Conference in Chicago, as a
record-breaking number of attendees mingled with their HR colleagues and
industry thought leaders.

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

By Kristen B. Frasch, Andrew R. McIlvaine and David
Shadovitz

The
Lake Michigan shoreline was mostly balmy and breezy as an estimated 3,500
attendees -- a conference record -- swarmed Chicago's sprawling McCormick Place
to hear about and see the very latest human capital management solutions and
trends at the 15th Annual HR Technology® Conference, which ran Oct. 8 through
10.

Tom
Koulopoulos delivered a rousing keynote to a crowded auditorium on the
conference's opening day. "My premise is you folks are the rock stars of
HR," said Koulopoulos, president and co-founder of the Boston-based
innovation consultancy Delphi Group and author of numerous books, including his
latest, Cloud Surfing: A New Way to Think About Risk, Innovation, Scale and
Success.

"My
premise is you're the most important people in the world now because you hold
the reins of where organizations are going," he said. Where that is, he
added, is into an uncertain future where technology itself takes second seat to
behavior. And it will be the cloud that will "alter the fundamentals of
how we manage work and human capital," and this behavior, he said.

"Our
kids are thinking through technology," as opposed to applying technology
to their thoughts and innovations, said Koulopoulos. "Human capital will
be defined more through the notion of community and how to manage that
community. And your role in HR will be to continue the connections that define
that community.

"Our
kids are inhabiting our organizations with the expectation that everything is
being personalized for them," he continued. "If you're not looking at
the way these kids will be expecting this intimate personalization and
community . . . where there will be no need for patents anymore . . . if you're
not capitalizing on that, then you're missing out."

Wrestling
with the Cloud

At
this year's conference, "the cloud" was the one buzzword that was
possibly mentioned even more than "social media." Seems like everyone
has, is planning to or is seriously considering moving their HR systems to an
outside, hosted, Software-as-a-Service platform. But how will they reap the
full business benefits of such a move? The conference's first ever "master
panel" devoted solely to the cloud, moderated by long-time conference
panelist Naomi Lee Bloom of Bloom & Wallace, offered the perspectives from
senior executives at six of the most important vendors in the space: Workday,
SAP, Salesforce.com, Oracle, Ultimate Software and ADP.

"From
a user-adoption perspective, how do we make these [cloud-based] tools truly
usable?" Bloom asked the panelists.

"I
teach a course at Stanford University, and one of my students -- a hardcore
technologist, by the way -- asked me 'Why does enterprise software have to be
so inhumane?'" said SAP's Sanjay Poonen, president of global solutions.
"Building our applications on the cloud gives us a clean slate. We're
hiring millennials to be our designers . . . because the way you interact with
an organizational chart in a technology landscape where everything now is 'zoom,
pinch,' like on a tablet, changes everything. We're taking these core
principles and using them as we build the cloud, and ensuring our customer base
gets in on the journey."

"Having
this clean slate on the cloud lets you build one organic thing, rather than in
parts and pieces," said Stan Swete, chief technology officer at Workday.
"This is the early part of the trend. Our path in Workday is 'pure play in
the cloud.' Our customers can take functionality as we drop it off to
them."

Bloom
questioned how customers can cope in a world where, thanks to the cloud,
vendors can continuously roll out new releases of their products throughout the
year -- how can they avoid being overwhelmed?

"Vendors
have to be thoughtful -- they can't just be throwing new releases out there and
wait for customers to turn them on," said Mike Capone, ADP's vice
president for product development and CIO. "We don't bill customers for
new functionality until they turn it on. You have to be thoughtful about
this."

John
Wookey, executive vice president of Salesforce.com, said his company takes a
different tack: "We tell customers that this new version of the software
is coming at this particular date, and you have no choice. And it's helped them
change the way they think about their business. Even some of our most
conservative customers have embraced this approach. And that would be my
advice: Embrace it. Your people are empowered by change."

Ultimate
Software's CTO, Adam Rogers, said his firm focuses on "delivery management,"
letting customers turn on new functionality at their leisure. It also provides
free training to customers, he said. "Does this mean 'free training' is
going to be the new standard?" asked Bloom, prompting laughter and
applause from the standing-room-only crowd.

Poonen
said SAP has experimented with new iterations of software releases, testing
them with "micro audiences" to see what works. It also has put out a
great deal of training videos on YouTube, he said.

In
answer to one of Bloom's final questions -- "Why should HR be paying
attention to this?" -- Wookey said, "Businesses of every size run on
technology. If you're going to speak the language of business, then you need to
speak the language of technology. The cloud, in the end, is all about speed and
agility in your organization. As for social technology, it's important for
people to be able to work together, and today they expect software to be just
as easy to use as what they find on the consumer side. And mobile technology
lets people do their jobs, regardless of where they are. So HR needs to be an
advocate for this."

The
Future of Recruiting

Once
again, as in previous HR Technology® Conferences, the union of recruiting and
technology -- and what it's going to look like going forward -- was the
juggernaut for consensus and debate.

Led
by moderators Gerry Crispin, principal and co-founder of CareerXroads, and
Sarah White, principal and founder of SW & Associates, this year's panel of
four staffing leaders from Lockheed Martin, Key Bank, PepsiCo and Deloitte took
up the still-evolving, often-troubling topic in Wednesday's session,
"What's Next? What Talent Acquisition Challenges are Seeking Technology
Solutions?"

All
agreed that, despite great strides in social recruiting, and recruiting
technology in general, even their organizations -- leaders in this new frontier
-- have a long way to go.

"I
would challenge any one of us to say we are fully prepared and where we need to
be," said panelist Frank Wittenauer, associate director of global talent
solutions for Deloitte. "Recruiting is still the last thing that gets
defined. When the economy is good, it's, 'Let's go, let's get the butts in
seats, let's do the background checks after they're hired.' When it's slow,
it's, 'Let's do six interviews, six times, and then six more, divide the
results by pi . . . ' " you get the idea. So did the crowded roomful of
chuckling attendees.

The
panelists were mixed on whether leveraging new recruiting-technology tools
should be a local activity for global companies or a global one. Should
companies be allowing their smaller, more remote recruiting teams to innovate
and move forward within their own domains and unique sets of circumstances or
should they all be aligning under one global-recruitment umbrella?

"It's
OK to let your recruiters have blinders on when it comes to recruiting
technology," said Mike Grennier, senior vice president of talent
acquisition for Key Bank.

Crispin
cautioned, though, that "there should be some way for that global
alignment to take place. They all have the tools to reach across global
boundaries," he said, "but who in your organization is showing them
the reach beyond their own domain?"

Still
emerging and highly imperfect, panelists agreed, is the effectiveness of
workforce planning as a pre-emptive, proactive social-recruiting tool. At the
very least, at PepsiCo, "we ask HR to identify jobs or profiles that are
hard to find and then keep [candidates] in store there -- in
waiting -- so there, we're pre-emptive," said Sheila Stygar,
PepsiCo's senior director of talent acquisition.

Also
fledgling and inadequate, they agreed, are the processes in place for dealing
with the plethora and proliferation of new, often smaller, vendors with
specific solutions to particular problems, or, as Crispin described them,
"small pieces to add to the entire [social-recruiting] function."

"Where
do you have in your organization someone who filters through all the solutions
out there?" he asked.

Grennier
suggested companies trying to find that "solution-filterer" look for
someone with "a real passion" for the social-recruiting function and
technology in general.

Panelists
also agreed that, as social recruiting continues to "find itself" as
a defined function within companies, recruiters learn to treat it
professionally and network with what Wittenauer described as "those go-to
people" in the vendor community -- people they can bounce all these new
offerings and suggestions off of.

"If
you don't have those networks," Crispin said, "you're not going to be
learning in real time."

The
Way We Learn Now

The
title of Josh Bersin's Tuesday morning session at this year's conference asked
the question, "Learning Systems: Where Are We Now?" Well, if you're
an HR leader, the short answer might be at a much better place than we were 15
years ago, when the HR Technology® Conference came into being.

Back
then, social tools, collaboration and mobile technologies weren't a part of the
conversation. But today, they obviously are.

Bersin
noted that your best employees are trying to learn all the time. "I was
talking to a CHRO of a large multinational earlier this morning about what
makes great leaders," he said. "What he concluded is that people on
high-performing teams manage themselves differently. They hold themselves more
accountable. And they're always trying to learn."

Thanks
to technology, he added, continuous development is now possible.

Bersin
cited YouTube videos -- one of "the best learning tools" available --
as examples. "When I wanted to figure out how to put a SIM card into my
BlackBerry, I went to YouTube, typed in 'SIM card' and 'install' and learned
how to put it in," he said.

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"Forward-thinking
companies are asking themselves how they can create YouTube-like experiences
for their employees -- where anyone can create a video asset and make it
available. That's what young people expect today."

Ideally,
Bersin said, the learning-management system is the perfect place to make formal
and informal learning happen. The LMS has morphed from being a place where
businesses "tracked training" to the place where "people
learn," he added.

"Most
of the administrative features are available in every LMS these days,"
Bersin said. "Where you see differentiation is in the [learning
experience]."

Bersin
also devoted a portion of his presentation discussing the state of the LMS
vendor landscape, sharing a list of current market-share leaders -- SumTotal,
SAP, Oracle, Cornerstone OnDemand and Saba.

A
Still-Fledgling Movement

In
rapid-fire -- at times, almost dizzying -- questions and answers, participants
in the HR Technology® Conference's Third Annual Social Media Panel grappled
with what to do with, how to encourage and how to handle today's also-rapid
influx of collaboration tools in the workforce.

Led
by moderator Kris Dunn, vice president of HR for Kinetix, the three panelists
-- Todd Chandler, vice president of learning and performance for Helzberg
Diamonds; Ben Brooks, senior vice president and global director of enterprise
communications and colleague engagement for Marsh Inc.; and Phoebe Venkat,
director of digital and social media communications for ADT Security -- fielded
questions via Twitter (including the conference's own HRTechConf group) and the
audience that seemed to underscore just how much the corporate-collaboration
movement has entered everyone's lives.

Not
to mention how untested and fledgling the movement still is. Perhaps Chandler
said it best: "We are just starting this journey."

How
do you create that culture change you need? What's it going to take in people
and resources? How do you incent those ambassadors you find in your workforce to
help champion and sell the idea? What should HR's role be? Who should own it?
The questions were perhaps as telling as the answers, indicative of just how
vast and untraveled the social-collaboration frontier is.

Interestingly,
more than one panelist bemoaned the fact that HR professionals are not out
front as some of the best social-collaboration ambassadors. "They say it's
because they're told they need to stay removed and keep a screen in place
between themselves and their employees," said Venkat. In other words,
there's a seeming danger for HR in embracing the real-time, interpersonal
transparency that collaboration affords.

"This
obviously needs to simply evolve as a mind-set," said Venkat. "It's
truly an issue of gradual trust."

No
More Annual Reviews?

At
technology firm ETS-Lindgren, the annual performance review is a thing of the
past, and at Motorola Solutions, it soon will be. "With the annual review,
you're trying to recall conversations and events that happened up to a year
earlier," said Vicki Colaneri, senior director of global workforce
technology at Motorola Solutions, which was split off from its larger sibling,
handset-maker Motorola Mobility, when the latter was acquired by Google last
year. "We want managers and employees to have regular, ongoing
conversations about performance, instead."

Averbook
began the conversation by asking each panelist to describe his or her current
challenges. WalMart's Adrian said he's focused on "simplifying and
improving" the talent-management tools used by the 2.2 million-employee
retailer and helping it build a "deeper bench of executive talent."
"My role right now is mostly about change management," he said.

Colaneri
said Motorola Solutions is "undergoing tremendous change,"
transforming itself into a "fast-moving, innovative company." It's in
the process of transferring over to Workday while standardizing its back-office
functions on Six Sigma.

Guaglianone
said Merck recently underwent a "big bang" implementation of SAP,
having every one of its global locations going live at once, and is currently
focused on deploying succession-planning tools to the workforce at large.

Moler
said her company has been using Rypple (now Work.com) for performance
management, having done away with annual performance reviews.

"A
lot of companies want to blow up their performance-management process,"
said Averbook. "Does doing that start with HR?"

Absolutely
not, said Moler. "It starts with a conversation between you and the
business leaders -- and you can't use terms like 'talent profiles' and 'talent
management' -- you have to talk in terms of how it's going to improve business
performance," she said.